(Commonwealth Union)_ Meta, formerly known as Facebook, announced the release of a section of its technology to prevent terrorism and human trafficking on the internet. It stated that it will enable other businesses to share data and curb the spread of violent pictures on the internet. This programme will be distributed in anticipation of Meta’s one-year presidency of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which begins in January.
Meta’s Hasher Matcher Actioner will be a free, open-source content moderation software solution “that will assist platforms identify copies of images or movies and take action against them in bulk,” according to Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg. The Hasher Matcher Actioner enables businesses to detect duplicated photos by examining hashes, or digital fingerprints. According to the business, those fingerprints or hashes are generated after photographs or videos are passed through an algorithm that generates a series of numbers or characters unique to that image. The hash enables for that data to be matched in mass, allowing photographs that violate the platform’s terms of service to be rapidly addressed and removed away, a technique Meta claimed will be helpful to smaller tech companies.
In 2021, Meta claimed it would spend $5 billion on safety and security, with over 40,000 personnel dedicated to the company’s efforts in online safety.
Meta is a founding member of GIFCT, a non-governmental group founded in 2017 by technology companies to tackle extreme content online, especially terrorism. When a terrorist act occurs, the GIFCT collaborates to generate a hash based on an online video recorded by a perpetrator or accomplice during the terrorist assault. This hash enables businesses to easily remove photographs from the internet. Companies in the GIFCT, such as Microsoft, Airbnb, Amazon, and current chair YouTube, frequently employ a hash-sharing database to ban videos and images that violate their terms of service.
Meta will take over as chair of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) Operating Board next month. GIFCT is a non-governmental organisation that brings together technology businesses to combat terrorist information on the internet through research, technical collaboration, and knowledge sharing. GIFCT was founded in 2017 and has since expanded into a non-profit organisation in response to the 2019 Christchurch Call, which brings together member corporations, governments, and civil society organisations to combat terrorist and violent extremist content online.
Meta is also making accessible a free open source software solution that it developed to assist platforms in identifying duplicate photos or movies and taking action against them in bulk. We anticipate that the Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA) tool will be adopted by a variety of firms to assist them in preventing the spread of terrorist content on their platforms, and that it will be especially valuable for smaller companies that lack the same resources as larger ones. HMA is based on Meta’s prior open source image and video matching algorithms and may be used to detect any form of illegal content.
According to Matthew Schmidt, associate professor of national security, international affairs, and political science at the University of New Haven, most terrorist activities and people trafficking are organised on the dark web. He believes that making open-source software available is crucial to reducing the venues where offending content can surface. However, he stated that it is unclear how this will impact what happens on the dark web.
GIFCT members frequently employ a hash sharing database to assist keep their platforms free of terrorist content. GIFCT retains a hash, or unique digital fingerprint, for each picture and video instead of harmful or exploitative content such as footage from violent incidents or terrorist propaganda. The more organisations that engage in the hash sharing database, the better and more complete it becomes — and the better we all are at keeping terrorist content off the internet, especially given that people frequently travel from one platform to another to spread this content. However, many businesses lack the in-house technical capacity to detect and filter offending information in large volumes, which is why HMA could be a useful tool.
